BilmBlog500

So on Saturday May 31, I finally got to explore the new Borders concept store for myself. The Southbury, CT store had opened for business the week before, but I was unable to go up for the soft opening. I had to settle for going up for the official grand opening weekend festivities, which just isn't the same. On one level, when you walk in the door it looks a lot like you're walking into a Borders. There's the same sign hanging down from the ceiling to tell you where the mystery/thrillers are, the same red shelf tags at front of store for the new hardcovers, there's a magazine section off to the right, and if you close your eyes and walk straight when you go in the door you'll bump into a table full of new books which the publisher feels are important enough to pay handsomely to put on a table that you'll have an easy time bumping into blindfolded when you walk in the front door. But this table is round, while the tables at the first 600 Borders to open have ...

In my day job, I usually find that the winning authors produce the goods consistently, book in and book out, year after year, and then sometimes come up with a novel that's truly and remarkably special, and every once in a while disappoint a tad, but by and large work with remarkable consistency. Like many great film directors, Sydney Pollack represents a very different path that I have a hard time adjusting to. The one masterpiece. The many good films. The highly and wildly overpraised turd. And then so much that you have a hard time believing came from the same director who did everything else. If my clients were as up and down as a Sydney Pollack and a Martin Scorcese I'd be grayer and balder if I weren't already so much of both. In Pollack's case, I consider Out of Africa to be Oscar bait, critics bait, the kind of turgid lugubrious epic that comes along every so often and which just isn't really very good. I don't think this one has stood the test of...

Memorial Day weekend reading; 2 slithy toads I'd come across this book at the Padwolf Publishing table at I-Con in late March and was immediately intrigued. I recognized the author's name for his work in one of the Writers of the Future anthologies and from magazines like Small Wars Journal but had not been aware of his work in young adult literature. After several weeks of good intentions I was pleased to finally make this my train reading on the way back from Balticon . It was a little bit awkward. This is the 6th book in the Wildsidhe Chroncles series, I had not read the first five of them, and I don't know if I can recommend starting in the middle. The basic premise is that three kids from Pennsylvania are captured by some spell and taken to the Wildsidhe. I did feel as if a smoother approach could have been taken to filling in a new reader on the series background. And there's a Gilligan's Island problem. As a kid it didn't bother me so much that t...

Seen Tuesday May 20 at the Clearview 1st & 62nd St., Auditorium #5, 2 slithy toads The new David Mamet film. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a mixed martial arts gym owner who gets involved with a Hollywood star and a fight promoter and a this and a that and a lot of other things. It's both an ungainly mess and a perfect example of compensation in the creative arts, where you have something really good going on in one place that helps make up for the really bad things that might be going on someplace else. i.e., John Grisham's THE FIRM doesn't have a great ending, but it has a fantastic beginning. Here, the good thing is the lead performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor. He believes every line he says, he radiates sincerity about every aspect of the situation he finds himself in, and he commands the screen with every fiber of his being. The only problem is that things don't make any sense. Pardons in advance for any spoilers, but the people who are out to get him are out to get...

Last week's Crains NY Business has an article about big cuts in initial orders at Borders that have publishers unhappy. I'd link, except you can't read the article without a subscription, which I don't have. Basically, orders on some titles look to be 10% to 50% below what publishers might have been expecting. And the ongoing closures of Waldenbooks locations are hurting sales in sf/fantasy and romance in particular. (Many of the stores that closed probably not selling much on an individual basis, but if you aggregate, it adds up.) Yes, books can be reordered, but Borders doesn't have the supply chain that gives me a lot of confidence on that front. B&N is more iikely to end up in a good place from a smaller initial. I'm starting to see signs of a quicker hook on some titles at Borders, following on their efforts to reduce title count and increase face-outs which I discussed here . As an example, the fifth and final book in a JABberwocky sold series i...

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Seen Sunday Morning May 18 @ the AMC Loews Kips Bay, Auditorium #9. 1.5 slithy toads. Port Authority. Seen Sunday Afternoon May 18 @ the Atlantic Theatre main stage. Me, 1 slithy toad; the rest of the world more? Yella. Seen Sunday Afternoon May 18 @ the Cinema Village, Auditorium #1. 2 slithy toads. Chicken Fajita Burrito. Eaten at the St. Marks Place Chipotle Sunday Evening May 18. Yummy Yummy in my Tummy Reprise. Seen Sunday evening May 18 @ the Landmark Sunshine Cinema, Auditorium #1. 3 slithy toads. So Narnia first. I had been terribly ambivalent about even seeing the first movie, but ended up finding it perfectly adequate. My hope and the buzz was in part that the 2nd movie would find the series settling into a groove, but I was underwhelmed. The biggest problem may be that I've seen all of this so many times before. How many fantasy novels or movies have I come across that start with an heir to the throne being spirited...

I'd give the Kindle 3 slithy toads. This seems a good day to write about the Kindle. I boarded a crowded Amtrak train to head down for a Charlaine Harris signing in Newark, DE, and while I was reading my Kindle I noticed a man across the aisle reading a Sony Reader. Whatever is the world coming to? So first, why do I have a Kindle, and not a Sony Reader? Well, I am a Mac person. The Sony Reader requires you buy stuff at the Sony Store, and they haven't made it easy to sync purchases on a Mac. I tried once to see if I could go to Sony's web site and at least check out the offerings and didn't even find that very easy to do. The Kindle, you don't even need a computer since you can shop wirelessly from within the Kindle. It also offered a feature that I found very tempting, that you could email your .doc files to your Kindle and have them show up there wirelessly for a ten cent fee. Some people think it's silly to pay to send your own files to yourself, b...

The Forever Stamp rules. For the first time I can remember, the arrival of a postal rate increase hasn't been marked with 2 weeks of 45-minute lines at my local Post Office. On the other hand, the size-based pricing rolled out a year ago for US first class has now been introduced for Air Mail as well, so stamping is always a pleasure.

Seen at the 3 PM matinee, Sunday March 30, 2008, at Studio 54. 1 slithy toad Seen at the 8 PM performance, August 23, 1984, at the Booth Theatre. My maximum 4 slithy toads I can't help but see this as an object lesson in both the ephemerality of creation and the subjectivity of its reception. When this opened in 1984 in New York City, it was generally hailed as a stunning achievement in the American musical. I'm surprised to see looking back at it that Frank Rich's review in The New York Times was a tad more calibrated in its praise than in my memory of it. Itself a musical about the act of creation, Sunday in the Park with George depicts the artist Georges Seurat "putting it together" (one of the song titles) for his painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. There on the stage he pokes and prods various characters revising slowly into the positions they have in the painting itself, while in his personal life his obsession with getting the ...

Seen at the AMC Empire 25, Auditorium #6, Sunday morning/afternoon May 4, 2008. 2.5 Slithy Toads It needs to be said right at the outset that I do not think there will ever be a superhero movie as good as Superman: The Movie. Most fall far short of that, or of any other decent standard. Fantastic Four 2, Daredevil. The Spiderman movies have come closest to it, in my eyes. It doesn't hurt that there's nothing better than a comparison viewing of the first Spiderman and of Superman: The Movie to suggest what template was being used in the creation of Spiderman. There has yet to be a decent Batman movie. Superman Returns was painful to watch. So from this vantage point, Iron Man falls somewhat short of Superman or Spiderman, but it's certainly a heckuva lot better than most of its competitors. If I had grown up reading Marvel instead of DC, maybe I'd feel differently about all of this, but I didn't, and I don't. Anyone reading my blog has probably read 28 o...

I've always felt a little bit guilty about this, but the past couple of years Steve and I did our London Book Fair flying on Eos Airlines. Business model: put no more than 48 passengers onto a 747, take very good care of them, and charge a competitively reasonable price for it. More than I might have paid if I'd flown business class on American and taken the earliest departures back from Heathrow, but less than if I was competing for space with the people wanting to take the 6:30 PM flight after their day of power meetings in London and sleep in their own bed in NY that night. First class service, business class price. This was important to me. I've paid my dues in the business, with my starting salary at Scott Meredith Literary Agency being $225/week (even in 1986, this didn't go very far) and when I went out on my own getting by for my first several years on gross commission revenue in the low $30Ks from which to pay all my business and personal expenses. I'v...